I have moved the thread to the Linguistics subforum.
I personally believe that it is a mistake to classify the Albanian language as purely Indo-European. I think it is originally a language of Old Europe (Neolithic South-East Europe, settled by Near Eastern farmers, so in all likelihood an Afro-Asiatic language), which was later influenced by the overbearing presence of neighbouring Indo-European languages. Garrick pointed out
in another thread the similarity between Albanian and Berber languages.
Taranis made a few noteworthy observations here, but the long time span that separate ancient Etruscan from modern Albanian would effectively allow for such phonetic changes (more vowels, distinction between between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants). Just look how French vowels have diverged from other Romance languages and from Latin. As for the voiced and unvoiced stop consonants, Korean doesn't, while Japanese does, and Japanese undeniably descends in part from Korean. When two languages converge to form a new hybrid language (like English or Japanese) or one language is strongly influenced by another (like French with Frankish), it is common to see major shifts in vowels and/or consonants. Albanian is obviously a hybrid language belonging to two linguistic families (Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European).
Besides the linguistic aspect, it makes sense that Etruscan and Albanian be related to ancient Near Eastern languages, since both ethnic groups were migrants from Anatolia or the Levant, and both are an admixture mostly of haplogroups J2 and E1b1b. I think we could indeed associate the Pelasgians to these two haplogroups. I believe that R1a1a and R1b1b2a1 came later to Greece, Macedonia and Albania. I personally find it most likely that R1a1a was brought by the Mycenaeans, and R1b1b2a1 by the Sea Peoples, Dorians, Celts and Romans.
On the other hand I don't think the Illyrians have anything to do with either the Etruscans or the Albanians.